Benchmarks are the rulers of AI, in both senses of the word. As measuring sticks, they work according to an extremely simple logic: If you want to know what an AI model can do, devise a standardized test to gauge it. But AI benchmarks can also dominate the behavior of the entire field. In 1987, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s first benchmark on automatic speech-to-text… Source Benchmarks are the rulers of AI, in both senses of the word. As measuring sticks, they work accor...

Redis is an in-memory database. Salvatore Sanfilippo started it in 2009, and it is now one of the most widely deployed pieces of server software. It is often used as a cache in front of a slower database. You talk to it over the network with short text commands such as SET user:42 "Alice" and GET user:42 . Each key maps to a value, and the value can be more than a string: Redis has lists, hashes, sets, sorted sets, streams and more, each with its own commands.  We often represent sets ...

The enormous advance in AI capabilities over the last several years has in large part been driven by the availability of vast amounts of training data. Gwern’s influential 2020 essay “ The Scaling Hypothesis ,” written after the release of GPT-3, argues that recent advances in AI have been the result of scale: bigger models, bigger datasets, and more compute spent training them. Gwern writes: The scaling hypothesis regards the blessings of scale as the secret of AGI: intelligence is ‘jus...

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In the OpenAI Math Drop some papers have Lean proofs, others don't, including L = RL = BPL. Why is it hard to formalize results on complexity classes? Let's consider an example, Lautemann's proof that BPP is in \(\Sigma^p_2\). It's a beautiful proof because it comes down to a single formula. I gave the full proof in a 2025 post , but to remind you, here is the setup. Let \(B\) be in BPP, accepted by a probabilistic polynomial-time Turing machine \(M\) with error bounded by \(2^{-n}\). Let...

Previous posts in this series introduced Frml , explained how it checks simplar scalar code and handles contracts between functions , and then discussed how it deals with loops , checks arrays , and checks built-in functions . The final language level, complete , doesn’t add any new features. Instead, it serves as a placeholder in case we want to extend the language further. I’m not going to do this myself, but if you are a student (or a professor looking for projects for students) p...

Authors: Divya Gadde , Ko-Jen Hsiao , Dhaval Patel and Moumita Bhattacharya The motivation for building the Netflix Foundation Model for personalization was laid out in this previous blog post. The Netflix homepage is powered by several specialized models and it requires significant time and resources to maintain and continue innovating on these individual models. Therefore, we decided to centralize member preference learning and have one powerful model learned from comprehensive user int...

Up until the 1960s, telephone calls were carried as analog signals. There was a great deal of frequency division multiplexing onto open wire , and sometimes coaxial cables , but in the post-war period buried multipair telephone cables began to dominate. While the network was surprisingly functional—long distance calls from coast to coast were still quite intelligible—there were fundamental limitations to analog carriers. The quality of the call would degrade with each step, a problem that ...

The amount of AI generated sales emails I get these days is astonishing. If you can't be arsed to write your own sales pitch, why the fuck should I be arsed about your product? Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️ You can reply to this post by email , or leave a comment . The amount of AI generated sales emails I get these days is aston...

Kevin Kelly 's The Inevitable articulates a handful of macro technological trends and follows them to their logical conclusions. It's an insightful read -- I highly recommend it. One decade later, here are some AI-related excerpts from the book: "By 2026, Google’s main product will not be search but AI." "oligarchy of two or three large, general-purpose cloud-based commercial intelligences" "The AI on the horizon looks more like Amazon Web Services" "The bulk of AI will be specia...

When software meets hardware, engineering principles remain largely the same, but the sensible defaults often change. Kuldeep Singh describes our experience modernizing a large IoT fleet of battery-powered sensors. Our familiar principles remained important; what changed was how we applied them. These practices emerged through experiments, failures, and operational experience—each challenge helping us replace a reasonable assumption with a more sensible default. m...

Writing stories. Sharing things that make me smile. Reading knowledge people have shared openly. Communities that organise knowledge. Project Gutenberg . New music by my favourite artists. Acoustic songs. The spark of “I should learn this on the piano!”. All the people who make events happen. ( related ) Attending events where I learn something new. Seeing people’s curiosity shine through. Learning about art. Having my mind opened by art. Discovering a new persona...

Formlabs sent me a Form Studio 1 resin 3D printer to test after years of back-and-forth about their Form 4 printer. Like the Form 4, it's an SLA (stereolithography) printer, but unlike the Form 4 (which starts at $2,600), it's affordable for a hobbyist. It's not cheap , coming in at $699 (or $749 with a flex build platform, which I highly recommend), but it is affordable. I can't say as much about this printer as people who are well-versed in resin printing and use other SLA printers (all...

In the hours following the release of CVE-2026-92392 for the project curl , site reliability workers and systems administrators scrambled to desperately rebuild and patch all their systems to fix a use-after-free in HTTP/2 upload retries where cleanup turns leftover upload data into a new request and leaves a pointer to a freed Curl_easy handle (apparently freeing it was only a suggestion), allowing a malicious server to achieve remote code execution under specific conditions . T...

I spent a week creating a new deflate implementation from scratch in C named tugz to provide an Info-ZIP -compatible zip program for w64devkit 2.10.1 (released today). I also replaced busybox-w32 ’s deflate-based unzip , gzip , gunzip , and zcat apps as well. My new deflate performs better than zlib but worse than libdeflate ( so far ). In general the new programs are substantially faster and produce slightly smaller outputs than the BusyBox equivalents, which is optimized f...

u/SnooSongs6758 asked on r/golang : I’m creating a REST API using Golang v1.25 , Gin v1.10.0 , and Validator v10.20.0 . I have a PATCH endpoint where, when the address attribute is: undefined -> keep the original data null -> delete the original data contains something -> replace the original data with the new Right now I’m using a pointer for it, so I can know when it’s null . The problem is that I couldn’t find a way to differentiate when the attribute is un...

Target employed about 415,000 team members on January 31, 2026, compared with about 440,000 a year earlier, according to its last two annual reports. This page covers Target employee statistics from company filings and dated reporting: headcount since FY2021, job cuts in 2025 and 2026, hourly pay and the CEO pay ratio, turnover by race and gender, leadership demographics, benefit use, the Bengaluru team and 2026 store payroll plans. Target Employee Statistics 415,000 Approximate team mem...

As an island nation, maritime awareness is essential to Taiwan’s national security. Its coastline stretches more than 1,500 kilometers across the main island and outlying islands, so keeping watch over the surrounding waters requires vessels, sensors, and operators spread over a wide area. Autonomous unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) can extend surveillance, but adding more USVs also means operators spend more time telling each vessel what to do.   Hivemind is Shield AI’s mission autonomy ...

Me: Why do they even call them clutch bags? Them: Clutch bags? Me: Yeah, that poster over there at the department store mentions “clutch bags” being on special. Does it involve a transmission of some sort!? Them: Isn’t it because you clutch it? Me: Pardon? Them: Clutch it… as in, hold onto it? Me: … Them: … Me: Well don’t I feel foolish. Them: Yeah, well you should. By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-10-15. Me: Why do they even cal...

If AI is so great, why aren’t we seeing an explosion of new, amazing software products? If anyone can turn their idea into working software with coding agents, where is all that software ? People have been asking this question for years. As far as I can tell, the answer is that it’s spread out over a lot of modestly successful projects: Somewhere between 2x and 20x new software is being created, depending on where you look There’s no real growth in massively successful software ...

I am a habitual tab hoarder so I created a Firefox addon to help me manage every one of my very special browser tabs. Sort tabs by oldest, unload them, find duplicates, and consolidate tabs to a single window — buncha useful stuff in there! Download from Mozilla Addons Source code on GitHub Features Go directly to a tab by clicking on it. Shows Duplicate tabs (any tab opened more than once) A special section to show any tabs currently playing audio (video counts if no...

New in the SumatraPDF pre-release builds : Back / Forward toolbar buttons The toolbar has Back and Forward buttons. Navigation history now also includes places you scrolled to and stayed on, not only table of contents and link jumps. Toggle citation hover preview Toggle Citation Hover Preview ( CmdToggleHoverPreview , command palette) turns the citation hover preview on or off. The CitationHoverDelay setting sets how long you hover before it appears...

Python 3.15 is here ! Here's the essential What's new in Python 3.15 guide, this year curated by 3.14 and 3.15 release manager Hugo van Kemenade. As someone who builds open source software that works in every supported Python version, I get to say goodbye to Python 3.10 and start embracing features from Python 3.11. First, some highlights from Python 3.15. Explicit lazy imports I'm most excited about Explicit lazy imports from PEP 810 . These let you import modules like so: lazy ...